Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ‘plays Robin’ to his strongman Prime Minister Vladimir Putin?s ‘Batman,’ the US Embassy in Moscow said, according to documents leaked on the whistleblowing WikiLeaks website.

A vast treasure trove of secret State Department cables obtained by the Web site WikiLeaks has exposed the inner workings of U.S. diplomacy, as well as bluntly candid assessments by American diplomats, according to news organizations granted advance access to the more than 250,000 confidential do…

According to Spiegel, Wikileaks reveals that US diplomats consider Foreign Minister Westerwelle to be incompetent and Chancellor Merkel to be risk averse. So what? Most Germans think the same. Of course, US diplomats are more candid in secret cables than in public statements. Everybody is.

Washington: US State Department documents released by whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks provided candid views of foreign leaders and sensitive information

The whistle-blowing website Wikileaks started on Sunday night with the dissemination of roughly 250,000 diplomatic US dispatches through international media. The documents weaken US diplomacy, commentators write, and urge a responsible approach to this new transparency.

Is WikiLeaks harming US interests?Palm Beach Post (blog)For example, documents might show that Turkey, a NATO ally, allowed arms to flow across its borders to terror groups in Iraq. That kind of revelation can

NZ Wikileaks Cables May Embarrass — PMVoxyThe earliest involving New Zealand is from the US embassy in Rome in October 1993 and also refers to Turkey. That is likely to be about New Zealand’s new

Wikileaks has begun publishing the leaked “embassy cables” at its website, with a handy ‘explorer’ at cablegate.wikileaks.org. In total, the cache includes 15,652 secret documents, 101,748 confidential ones, and 133,887 that are unclassified. Iraq is the ‘most discussed’ country, while Ankara, Turkey, produced the most cables. External political relations and internal government affairs account for most of the cache, but more than 100,000 items concern human rights and economic conditions. 28,801 concern terrorism.

When Hossein Ghanbarzadeh Vahedi, a 75-year-old American of Iranian descent, decided to visit relatives in Tehran in May 2008, he took a flight from Los Angeles in the normal way. When he returned home, his means of transport was somewhat less orthodox.

Embassy cables reveal how US relentlessly cajoles and bullies governments not to give succour to Tehran

Sitting in the Rome office of Franco Frattini, the Italian foreign minister, in February this year, Robert Gates, the veteran US defence secretary and former CIA chief, issued a chilling warning of war in our time.

The United States government has urged Wikileaks not to publish new files because they will risk “countless” lives. In a letter to Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website, the Obama administration said that releasing the documents, rumoured to be seven times the size of the Iraq War Logs, would be in breach of U.S. law, and would result in “grave consequences.” Assange replied by stating that the U.S. did not want to be held to account.

By various reports, today at 430pm ET is the expected go-live point for Wikileaks‘ latest coordinated “radical transparency” dump: some 250,000 US State Department diplomatic cables, with partnered coverage expected again, as with prior releases, in Der Spiegel,The New York Times, and the Guardian. This time, El Pais and Le Monde are part of the early access club, according to a Wikileaks tweet.

Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks is preparing to leak thousands of documents detailing correspondence between U.S. embassies around the world. American diplomats have contacted international allies, briefing them on the planned disclosure.